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In the summer of 1994, following the conclusion of the 12th session of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, the Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities sent the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to the UN Commission on Human Rights. This was a necessary step for the Draft in route to the ultimate approval by the UN General Assembly that its proponents hope to achieve. But in February 1995, the Draft Declaration was put in jeopardy of de-railment when the Human Rights Commission ordered the Draft reviewed by a new working group. That group, named the "Open-ended Inter-sessional Working Group" (referred to herein as the "Inter-sessional"), held its first meeting from 20 November to 1 December 1995. The proceedings from the meeting demonstrate an attempt by a coterie of states, led by the United States, to commandeer the debate on indigenous rights, as they try to maintain their control of international law and the United Nations' role in enforcing the principles found in the Draft Declaration.
Because of its role as the one surviving super-power at the end of the Cold War, with the financial leverage to determine the future of the United Nations, the US has inordinate control over the way the Draft Declaration is being worded and what exactly the document will imply as policy. The United States intends that its own model for treatment of indigenous peoples should be emulated by other states, and therefore that the Draft Declaration should reflect the order of US Indian Law. The agenda is not merely to define a simple moral order; more important, the US is attempting to create a broader, more encompassing hegemony that minimizes the possibility that indigenous peoples might actually be protagonists of their own destinies.
The rationale behind US policy is quite apparently that, as the biggest stakeholder in the world economic system, it believes it has the right to limit the number of nations that can achieve independent statehood. Each new state that comes into the system taxes the managerial resources of the system, because each one expects to increase its political and economic power. Each new state demands the perquisites that correspond to becoming truly independent, to be treated as a legitimate "people" in control of its own destiny, thus demonstrating to non-state actors like indigenous peoples that self-determination might also be within their reach. Each new state must be kept at least marginally satisfied in economic rewards, in order to be kept from returning to the socialist competition that has been abandoned for the past five years. And all states in the private club that is the United Nations expect that the "unruly mob" of hundreds of indigenous peoples that also aspire to control their own destinies will be kept at bay with a general policy designed to mollify them.
Fourth World Bulletin • Spring/Summer 1996
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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